Though the combined works are comprised of the three publications, all of moderate length, Isaac Kramnick’s “The Portable Enlightenment Reader,” contains only excerpts from Part I of the work and, indeed, these selections only encompass passages from the first 24 pages of the full document. While it is true one could write a hundred different papers on the content of just these first 24 pages, the reader who is limited to Kramnick's abridged version loses a great deal of understanding and context of what Paine genuinely intended to convey.
The first, and perhaps most telling question we must ask when examining the context of the publication, is why was The Age of Reason published in three parts? To understand this, the historical context of the writings, as well as Paine’s own personal experiences need to be explored. Immediately before he composed the first part of The Age of Reason, Paine had just published his work On the Rights of Man part II. As a result of the revolutionary ideas contained within that text, which declared all men equal, and spat in the face of the British monarchy, Paine’s work was declared seditious, and he was forced to flee Britain for the relative safety of France, where the French Revolution had just taken place. Paine’s radical views on equality and religion conformed much more closely to the French, and as such, he first published The Age of Reason in France in 1793, and only later in 1794 did it first begin to be distributed in England. [2]
Despite fleeing persecution in England for being too radical, Paine was actually considered too moderate for the Jacobin rulers of France. The hardliners carrying out the Reign of Terror at this point in time in France did not trust Paine, in part because of his writings in The Age of Reason, which advocated natural religion, and espoused a belief in God, as it contradicted the atheism advocated by the revolutionaries. The French authorities jailed Paine for ten months, and during this time in prison he actually composed Part II of the work.[3] This too is interesting because it shows us that despite being sentenced to die by the guillotine because of his work (a fate from which, in a strange turn of events, he only escaped from due to an error on the part of the jailer, who forgot to mark his cell for execution) Paine continued to lambast organized religion while advocating a natural, personal relationship with God. Only through the intervention of the new American Minister for France—future president James Monroe—did Paine manage to escape captivity, at which time he immediately began publishing part II in conjunction with part I.
In 1796 Daniel Isaac Eaton published and sold parts one and two of The Age of Reason together at the Cock and Swine, located at number 74, Newgate-Street in London.[4] Eaton, who we will explore in depth later, was forced to flee England for the United States after being convicted of seditious libel for publishing and selling radical and controversial works, such as this one. Paine personally financed the publication of 15,000 copies to be sent to the Americas, and in the late 1790s he was forced to follow Eaton into exile as he too fled to the U.S.A. Upon his arrival in the United States, Paine began work on the third and final part of the work, which, like the second, involved an in-depth analysis of scripture and bible passages in an effort to show their stupidity. Paine endeavored to analyze the bible not as a holy text, but rather as any other book, and in this way he hoped to point out the absurdity of the text. Part two, however, which was published shortly before his arrival in the Americas, created a massive controversy even amongst his admirers in the States, and fomented a severe negative backlash against him. The uproar was so profound, in fact, that it helps explain why the third part of the work was published nearly ten years after the first two parts. In 1802, Thomas Jefferson himself pleaded with Paine not to publish the third part of the book for fear of the passionate and potentially dangerous backlash it would surely cause. Paine actually held off on publication for five years, but in 1807 he published the third part anyway, despite knowing it would set off another explosive reaction from readers. It did not sell well.[5]
Having explored the structure of the work, we can turn our attention to the historical and intellectual framework from which it was composed. The Age of Reason was written, by Paine’s own admission, for the people of France, yet it is dedicated to “My Fellow-Citizens of the United States of America.” Interestingly, although this dedication is included in Kramnick’s selection, it does not appear in the original version published in 1794 by Daniel Eaton, which contained both parts one and two. This omission does not, however, seem to be a mistake on the part of Kramnick, but rather one of many fascinating questions surrounding the publication history of the works. By the time Paine composed Part I of The Age of Reason, he had already been forced to flee Britain for France. The first part of The Age of Reason was published on its own in London in early 1794 by Joel Barlow, and sold for the miniscule price of three pence[6]. No French version of just the first part has ever been discovered, though some have claimed such a version did exist prior to 1794. In the original, English version, the dedication to the people of the United States appears. However, by 1796, when Parts I and II of the book were published together by Daniel Isaac Eaton in London, the dedication is nowhere to be found. Several possibilities exist for the reasoning behind the omission. First, it is possible that Eaton, despite his willingness to publish Paine’s work at the risk of prosecution, did not feel comfortable including a dedication to the people of a country that had just fought a bloody war with England for her independence. It is also possible that by the time Eaton’s version was being published, part I had caused enough of a negative reaction in the Americas to convince Paine or Eaton (or both) that including the dedication was no longer appropriate.
Another interesting facet of the work is the context of the larger publication. Parts I and II of work were sold for one shilling and sixpence, which when translated into modern monetary units, is about twelve dollars. Though this would seem to indicate that the work was priced fairly modestly, when you take into account the average earnings index, which determines what a particular amount of money would be equivalent to for the average person during a given time period, one shilling and sixpence actually translates to about 140 dollars. This is a much more telling number, as it indicates that this book was not meant for the common man, but rather, it was directed toward intellectuals and those who could afford to spend their earnings on political treatises. Indeed, on the second page of the book, there appears a list of other publications by D.I. Eaton, almost all of which are political works of radical thinkers, such as Paine, as well as several defenses of the more conservative elements of the British political spectrum. Clearly, Mr. Eaton catered to those members of the public who had the intellectual and financial capacity to keep up with modern British politics, as well as the revolutions in France and America.
Also of some import, are the advertisements which are found in Eaton’s edition of the work, and to a degree it is almost funny to try and reconcile such a brilliant, irreverent, and controversial work on the nature of religion and state with the nature of some of the ads found within it. One particular advertisement for a book titled, “The Oneirocritic: Being a Treatise on the Art of Foretelling Future Events by Dreams, Moles, Cards, the Signs of the Zodiac and the Planets” is both humorous and thought-provoking. Obviously it seems funny to advertise a book about fortune telling, sooth-saying and the like within the same work as something as serious and controversial as The Age of Reason. To include such an advertisement would be, in my opinion, to openly mock the serious nature of Paine’s arguments. It seems beyond ironic to talk about the fake “mumbo-jumbo” of telling the future in the same breath as Paine’s vicious attack on organized religion (something I believe he would equate with fortune-telling). Such a strange decision on the part of the publisher raises further questions though that may help to explain the advertisements, and lend further context to the work. It is a possibility that Paine’s work was in fact so controversial that the only advertisers they could find to put in his works were a little strange and quirky. Maybe no respectable books or businesses would want to associate themselves with Paine’s radicalism, so instead they were forced to recruit other, less well-respected sources in order to secure revenue. It is also interesting, and a bit humorous to note that the fortune-telling book sells for 5 schillings, which as discussed earlier, is a large amount of money for the time, and vastly less than what Paine’s work sold for.
It is also interesting to note that, despite threats of prosecution for any booksellers or publishers who printed or distributed Paine’s books, Eaton was based in London, and he was not the only English publisher to tempt fate by giving Paine’s radical views a platform. In fact, the zeal with which the British government actively prosecuted any publishers and booksellers who distributed Paine’s work speaks to the level of radical thought contained within his works. However, the courage of the men willing to be imprisoned and maligned for their belief in Paine’s ideas, or even just in their belief in his right to express them via a free press, is exemplified in the original document, where Eaton includes a letter from “The Bookseller to the Public” in which he takes on an irreverent, proud tone that would have made Paine proud. In what is perhaps the most important aspect of the original text that we simply cannot understand without going directly to the source of the work, Eaton writes that:
It is not intended by this Note to the Reader to apologize, nor is it necessary, for the publication of the Second Part of a work called “THE AGE OF REAON,” written by so celebrated an author as THOMAS PAINE. The publisher knows, that as well as there are persons biased by prejudices there are other blinded by partiality. The best men are influenced by long and ancient habits and practices…All rational men allow TRUTH to be discovered by free discussion, to follow unrestrained research. The subject which THE AGE OF REASON holds to our view, is confessedly of the first importance; if the Writer, equally zealous for freeing his fellow creatures from their religious as from their political shackles, should be found to have erred in his means, or failed in his intentions, it will be for more matured philosophy to set him right. It is, and ought always to be the business of the lovers and abettors of Truth (among whom the Publisher of these sheets is desirous to be classed) to hold up both sides of the question, that REASON may determine which is right.[7]
Eaton was neither the first, nor the last British publisher to take a stand against censorship and tyranny with this work. Thomas Williams, another small publisher who produced his own edition in 1796 that sold only about 2,000 pamphlets, was indicted by the British government in 1797 for sedition and given a sentence of one year’s hard labor. Following his conviction, no new copies of the book were produced or sold in the open in Britain until 1818, when another publisher named Richard Carlile published it within an anthology of Paine’s works. [8]
[1] Over 100 years after the publication of The Age of Reason, Theodore Roosevelt famously called Paine a “filthy little atheist”
[2] Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Reason
[3] Joseph Lewis, Thomas Paine and the Age of Reason
[4] Eaton, 3
[5] http://www.ushistory.org/paine/reason/index.htm
[6] Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Reason
[7] Eaton, A1
[8] Even then, more than 20 years after the original publication of the book, Carlile was convicted of seditious libel. Such prosecution related to The Age of Reason continued in Britain for nearly a half a century, and affected dozens of publishers and perhaps hundreds of book vendors.
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